I agree that Khan Academy has its uses. If I was a homeschooling parent and wasn’t so great at math, I would probably be using Khan Academy as a resource. Either to re-view the material myself before teaching my child or to have my child watch it directly.

The main criticism I have is that there are people out there (Bill Gates, Dept. of Education gurus) that think Khan Academy can be used as the only resource for learning. They don’t see the benefits of having students work together. They don’t understand that math is more than an algorithm or set of rules. And mainly, they don’t understand the value of a live teacher interacting with a students.

It’s interesting that both Seymour Papert and Sal Khan share experience at MIT in common (See the OWS chapter “My Background as a Student”). A discussion between them would prove very interesting. Hopefully Papert will recover enough from his accident at some point in the future to have this discussion. I believe they share a vision of what education ought to be. There is an opportunity to investigate this by comparing Papert’s Logo programming language and the new Khan Academy Computer Science tutorials.

I just finished a month of teaching 5th graders to program using the new Khan Academy Computer Science tutorials, function library, and spin off programs. The classroom teacher and I did this to supplement and reinforce the geometry unit the students were learning. In the midst of this activity we realized that many students never understood ordered pairs until they had to create a program to draw triangles. Computer programming is not part of the elementary school curriculum so we were free to try “flipping the classroom”. That is, let the students go at their own pace, mastering as much programming skill as they were able. What we discovered is the students don’t want to stop learning to program. We have given them access to a tool and they have taken responsibility for their own learning. (See the OWS chapter “How Education Happens”).

Remember Khan Academy is not about watching how-to videos. It’s about wanting to know something and finding a tool that helps you learn.

Just thought someone here might be a really good candidate to help them get better.

@Mary, I don’t disagree with Khan Academy as a good resource. I have a number of issues with it as a learning system as well as Khan’s educational philosophy. I’m going to try to pinpoint them here as well as reply to your Papert quotation.

1) I have not read all of OWS, but I have viewed Khan’s TED talk, a Forbes interview, and a recent Gates Foundation keynote where he discusses his views on the education system, so I feel like I understand his perspective, I just disagree. He looks at edu as a content delivery system…kids come in, get content, show mastery, matriculate. He doesn’t see why that has to follow the Prussian model of formal ed where students are placed in age-based cohorts. For him, the ease of content delivery in numerous ways (he would call it Personalized Learning) makes our current model ineffective at best.

2) Papert believed in constructivism, a learning theory focused on the student as a maker of knowledge (constructivists often talk of knowledge as something everyone creates) through hands-on practical exercise and authentic experimentation that affect the student and his/her environment (crude summary). For Papert, computers were transcendent machines that allowed numerous opportunities for hands-on practical application that changes environment through programming, design and application. The classroom becomes ineffective here because students can create and program with ease, not be lectured to and run through meaningless exercises of drill and kill.

So while Khan and Papert see the computer as transformational, how they get there could not be more different. Khan Academy replaces the teacher for a video, but it’s still lecture. The flipped classroom says you do your homework at school, but if the homework looks like the quiz problems KA generates in their tutorials, it’s just behaviorist assessment of an inauthentic situation. Papert wanted the computer as a machine of creation, not as a replacement of an outdated learning model.

Khan Academy is not new…it’s technology used to do something we’ve been doing for a long time…lecturing at kids and having them do drills to show a competency. Papert wanted knowledge to transform students…not just competent enough to pass an arbitrary exam, but the ability to use the knowledge in a life context as needed.

I watch how-to videos a lot…how to fold a fitted sheet, how to tie a bow tie, how to change my car oil. It provides me a startin point for a skill I need in that moment (but still need practice for). That being said, tying a bow tie won’t help me launch rockets with my son, and folding a fitted sheet won’t help me communicate a thought effectively. The skills we teach youngsters and want our students to learn are those applicable, transferrable cognitive and creative skills. In my life, I never solve for x on paper…I am presented with a problem and have to utilize algebra in my environment to solve. For some kids, switching from the lecture and worksheet to real life is easy peasy, but most struggle, and in effect don’t do well with math. Khan Academy doesn’t change that paradigm, it just cuts out a weaker lecturer for a stronger one, never questioning that this didactic method might not be the best one.